“Good” Doctors and Teachers* (Part 1)

During the 1930s, my grandmother saw a specialist about a melanoma on her face. During the course of the visit when she asked him a question, he slapped her face, saying, ‘I’ll ask the questions here. I’ll do the talking.’ Can you imagine such an event occurring today? Melanomas may not have changed much in the last fifty years, but the profession of medicine has.  Eric J. Cassel, 1985[i]

Today, a stinging slap to the cheek of a patient who asked a question of her doctor could lead to an assault charge. Doctor-centered practice–paternalistic authority is no more. Shared decision-making between doctor and patient has become the ideal. In short, the definition of a “good” doctor has changed dramatically in the past half-century.[ii]

Even with this 180 degree shift in defining “goodness,” there remains much variation even among former TV doctors Welby and Kildare and today’s Dr. House. All are seen as “good” in different ways as times change.

And that is why I put “good” in parentheses. Personal features (e.g., communication skills, empathy), expertise (e.g., credentials on walls, medical specialty), what others say, and context matter greatly in judging how “good” a doctor is.

Here is how one doctor puts the issue of defining “goodness” among physicians.

In my view, there are many ways a doctor can be good, so it’s difficult to know what someone means when he or she says a doctor is good.

For some people, being a good doctor is all about bedside manner, personality and communication skills. Other people value smarts, technical skills or expertise in a particular condition. Still others rely on credentials, such as where a doctor went to medical school or residency training. I’ve even known patients who care little about these other factors and instead care most about how the office runs, how quickly the phone is answered or how friendly the receptionist is.

The type of doctor may also determine how a person defines a good doctor. For example, many people I know say they don’t care about a surgeon’s bedside manner as long as his or her patients have outstanding results. Yet those same people might say that a good bedside manner is much more important for their primary care physician.

Then there are those magazines that list “best” doctors in their cities annually. How do they compile such lists? New York magazine, for example, depends upon a private firm that polls doctors for their recommendations:

The idea is that medical professionals are best qualified to judge other medical professionals, and if one recommendation is good (think of your doctor referring you to a specialist), multiple recommendations are better. Licensed physicians vote online (castleconnolly.com/nominations) for those doctors they view as exceptional.

So if the notion of a “good” doctor varies by time–doctor-centered then and patient-centered now– it also varies by what patients and doctors, each having quite different perspectives, value most in medical practitioners (e.g.,competence,  empathy, bedside manner). In short, there is not one single definition of a “good” doctor that covers all settings, perspectives, and times.

Yet even with all of this variation over what constitutes a “good” doctor, even with all of those lists of personal and technical features that patients want in their doctors, two generic characteristics emerge from the flow of words time and again. These basic features: competence and caring–turn up in studies (see here) and public opinion polls among both physicians and patients.

Keep in mind, however, that even the most competent and caring doctor depends upon the patient for any success in diagnosis and treatment. The truth is that expertise and caring are necessary ingredients for any definition of “goodness” in medical practice but, overall, insufficient in the helping professions without the patient’s cooperation.

While doctors can affect a patient’s motivation, if that patient is emotionally depressed, is resistant to recommended treatments, or uncommitted to getting healthy by ignoring prescribed medications the physician is stuck. Medical competence and empathy fall short when patients cannot or do not enter into the process of healing.

This basic predicament in the helping professions of being dependent upon the cooperation of the patient for any success–often unremarked upon–hobbles any definition of a “good” doctor.

Does the historical shift in definitions about “good” doctors and the fundamental dilemma they face apply to teachers? I answer that in Part 2.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[i]Epigraph story in Christine Laine and Frank Davidoff, “Patient-Centered Medicine,” JAMA, 1996, 275(2), p. 152.

[ii] Ronald Epstein, Md., et. al. “Communicating Evidence for Participatory Decision-making,” JAMA, 2004, 291(19), pp. 2359-2366; Simon Whitney, Md., et. al., “A Typology of Shared Decision Making, Informed Consent, and Simple Consent,” Annals of Internal Medicine, 2003, 140, pp. 54-59.

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*Synonyms for “good” are “best,” “great,” “effective,” “stellar,” etc.

Kindergarten and Technology (Sharon Davison)

This post comes from kindergarten teacher Sharon Davison. It was posted on June 17, 2014. I have taken  her self-description from “About” on her blog.

My name is Sharon Davison and I have the pleasure of being a Kindergarten teacher in Vermont. I have been teaching for 25 + years.  During my teaching career I have worked with 1st through 4th grade.  I am now embarking on a new journey… Kindergarten!

Kindergarten is like a breath of fresh air everyday.  Young children are curious and great observers.  They naturally look for patterns, similarities and make connections spontaneously. Kindergarten life was designed and created by me with these ideas in mind.  I love the daily energy and excitement that children bring each day.  This genuine interest and love for learning is what I enjoy the most.  Through a young child’s natural ability to seek out understanding I try to capture this idea to help promote the love of learning.

I use a variety of technologies that help to engage, enhance and inspire children to want to pursue their ideas.  I have found that once you are inspired to learn, you learn how to learn through your ideas about what you understand.  Blogging, wikis, voicethreads, podcasting, ePals and SKYPE are just a few of the technologies that I use to promote the love of learning in Kindergarten.

I value collaboration and innovation.  The world is changing so fast and the tools that are available to support, enhance and engage from a teaching view are endless.

 

As I am finishing up last minute things in my classroom today I was thinking about all the different ways my students have been mentors this past year with each other, helping model how to tweet and blog with other classrooms as well as sharing their expertise with adults.

Last spring a teacher approached me and wanted to observe how I use technology with my students and was also interested in how I use the SMARTboard as well. I asked one of my students to provide additional support and more 1:1 time after our meeting.  As I watched and listened to the conversation I was really impressed with not only how comfortable my student was with the SMART technology, but the problem solving that took place during this 1:1 support time with a teacher.  I loved seeing the teacher take notes as she asked questions about not only the operation of the board, but what happens when things go wrong and do not work.  Watching my student navigate through how to solve problems as they arise was really wonderful.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am not only proud of all my students, but this experience reminded me of the importance of  self direction, problem solving and critical thinking.  All of these ideas were happening at once and being facilitated by one of my kindergarten students.  As a teacher of young children I have a unique opportunity to model explicitly how synchronous and asynchronous tools can be integrated in a seamless way in regards to learning.  Once my students understood how this tool works, how we use it, then they are able to create and design their ideas as well and make contributions.  Through our contributions and being able to teach and share what we know with others we get inspired, experience positive self esteem and make connections.  This student was empowered because she was able to make a contribution, help another teacher and engage in conversations that challenged her thinking and helped her reflect on what she has learned.  For this amazing teacher, my friend, I think about what great professional development this was for her!

MOOCs and Online Instruction: Cartoons

Recently, I posted an update on MOOCs after three years in the hype cycle. Afterwards, I scoured the web for cartoons on MOOCs and its kissing cousin, online learning (aka elearning, distance education). Here are some that might make you smile, giggle, or even prompt a chuckle. If not, maybe you can point me to one that does get you to laugh. Until then, enjoy!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Gift That Never Stops Giving–Teaching*

I wrote this post four years ago. With graduation ceremonies in K-12 and college occurring now and in the next few weeks, and so much in the news about the quality of teaching and how to capture it, I thought I would run the post again.

 

A dear friend and I exchanged emails recently and she mentioned that she had heard from a student she had in 1960. She had taught in the New York area for a number of years before returning to graduate school but recalled with much warmth how fine a group of sixth graders she had that particular year. The then 11 year-old, now a grandma, had stayed in touch with my friend over the years. She had become a teacher and had just retired and was now writing about the adult lives of classmates.

I began thinking of the often unspoken psychic rewards that accrue (in business terms, I would call it: the return on investment) to experienced teachers who have had many groups of students pass through their classroom over the years and how some of those students (such as Steven Strogatz) make a point of visiting, writing, and staying in touch with their former teachers. Fortunately, that has happened to me when a few former students at Glenville High School in Cleveland and from Cardozo High School in Washington, D.C. have stayed in touch. Ditto from some former Stanford graduates. When letters or pop- in visits occur, I get such a rush of memories of the particular student and the class and the mixed emotions that accompany the memories. Teaching is, indeed, the gift that never stops giving.

Those former students who stay in touch over the years, I have found, attribute far too much to my teaching and semester- or year-long relationship with them. Often I am stunned by their recollections of what I said and did. In most cases, I cannot remember the incidents that remain so fresh in their memories. Nor had I tried to predict which of the few thousand high school students I have taught would have reached out to contact me, I would have been wrong 75 percent of the time. My flawed memories and pitiful predictive power, however, cannot diminish the strong satisfaction I feel from seeing and hearing classroom tales from former students.

However policymakers and researchers define success in teaching or produce pay-for-performance plans the hard-to-measure influence of teachers upon students turns up time and again in those graduates who reach out to their former teachers. Those graduates seek out their former teachers because of how they were pushed and prodded, how intellectual doors were opened, how a ready ear and kind words made possible a crucial next step for that young man or woman. Student test scores fail to capture the bonds that grow between experienced teachers and children and youth who look for adults to admire, adults who live full, honest, and engaged lives. Am I waxing romantic about the currently unmeasurable results of teaching and the critical importance of retaining experienced teachers? No, I am not. I have a point to make.

My friend’s story of her former 11 year-old student still staying in touch because the relationship forged in 1960 between a group of sixth graders and a young teacher has resonated in a handful of graduates’ lives for many years. Something beautiful and long-lasting occurred when those bonds were forged in that Long Island elementary school, something that eludes current reformers eager for getting new teachers into classrooms and not worrying too much if they leave after two years since a new crop of fresh newcomers will replace them.

Turnstile teachers cannot forge those lasting bonds with students. Staying at least five-plus years give teachers the experience and competence to connect with classes and individual students. For those students lucky to have experienced teachers who had their older brothers and sisters, whose classrooms they want to eat their lunches in, whose reputations for being tough, demanding, caring, and a dozen other admirable traits draw children like magnets to their classrooms, the impressions and memories of these teachers will serve as guideposts for the rest of their lives. These are the teachers, district, state, and federal policymakers need to retain through mindful policies that encourage, not discourage teachers–policies that spur teacher growth in what and how they teach, foster collaboration among teachers, and motivate teachers to stay at least five-plus years in classrooms.

Were such thoughtful policies to be adopted, the chances of alumni students returning to tell their teachers how much they appreciated their help would increase and not become just a fleeting memory of some former teachers like me and my friend.

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*I thank Selma Wassermann for converting the commercial one-liner for a credit card company into an ad for teaching

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COMMENT FROM EARLIER POST:

I’m a public school teacher now, but I’ve taught in private instruction, mostly test prep, for seven years. I’ve had kids for just 12 weeks in a Kaplan class that I still hear from occasionally. Most are now starting grad school and want to know my thoughts on prep and school selection, but others just write to tell me good news. I was entering a department store when I suddenly recognized the young man holding the door open for me–he was a student I’d taught for 3 months four years ago at another private instruction company I work at. He’d seen me from across the parking lot, recognized me, and waited to see if I knew him. We chatted for several minutes and he called the company later to get my email address so he could ask my advice.

I probably won’t stay at my current public high school teaching job (too far a commute), but I know my kids will email me and ask for help.

The ability to forge connections really can’t be taught. You either have it or you don’t. And while I went to a highly rated teacher training program, it did nothing to teach me to forge bonds with my students (in fact, the program did its best to sever its bond with me for most of the year I endured there.). I had the skill already, and many of my classmates did as well.

I’m all for keeping teachers around for five years or more; I just doubt your assertion that time in the field creates the ability to forge lasting connections.

 

Philanthropic Advocacy for School Reforms

I … challenge the wisdom of giving public sanction and approval to the spending of a huge fortune ….My object here is to state as clearly and as briefly as possible why the huge philanthropic trusts, known as foundations, appear to be a menace to the welfare of society.

Frank Walsh, Chairman of the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations, 1915

 

Yes, a century ago, Walsh pilloried the richest man in the world who had established a foundation in his name, John D.Rockefeller, in advancing his corporate interests–then in oil, coal, and scores of other enterprises. His namesake foundation was a “moulder of public thought.”

A century later, critics are making similar charges that donors to school reform (see here and here) shape the policy agenda of districts, states, and the federal government when it comes to improving the nation’s schools.

If you think I am suggesting that donors and criticism of their charity comes around again and again, you are on the money (see here and here). The cyclical nature of philanthropic grant-making by both progressive-leaning and conservative-leaning foundations to advance different versions of urban reform–do any readers remember the Ford Foundation in the late-1960s funding decentralization in school reform and the harsh criticism the Foundation encountered including federal legislation in 1969?– is evident to me. As William Faulkner said: The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.

How come?

There is a theory that when new organizations are born, they imprint the organizational goals, norms, and rules that last for decades as they mature and thrive even when the environment changes on them. Just like when naturalist Konrad Lorenz showed how new-born goslings saw him first and attached to him–following him everywhere for as long as they lived.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Those years in the early 20th century, then, of wealthy businessmen forming foundations to give away their fortunes to help others and getting criticized for pursuing their corporate interests of the day is where the Walsh committee’s censure of John D. Rockefeller enter the picture. Imprinted on these foundations was that wealthy donors will do what they seek to do even if goes against the public interest. Since then, legislators and critics have lambasted donors during difficult economic times, social disruption, and political divisions for not being true to their stated goals. And the first decade of the 21st century is one of those times.

Why now?

The largest donors today (Gates, Walton, Dell, Broad, Fisher, etc.) began as entrepreneurs who created wealth and have decided to focus on causes dear to them including school reform. They have shifted their attention and dollars away from individual grants scattered among state and local districts to push their version of school reform (e.g., charter schools, alternative pools of educators such as Teach for America, teacher evaluation, Common Core State Standards) by making joint grants to the same entities (e.g., charter management organizations, big districts led by superintendents and school boards partial to their agenda) and national policy advocacy, that is, creating new organizations and funding existing ones such as “think tanks” that will influence legislators, educational policymakers, and the general public (e.g., New America Foundation, Brookings Institution, American Enterprise Institute) to do the right thing.

Researchers Sarah Reckhow and Jeffrey Snyder have documented the extent of what they call “convergent” funding of particular organizations between 2000 and 2010 that advance national policy agendas big donors want. In 2000, for example, 23 percent of donor money went to organizations that received funds from two or more major foundations. A decade later, 64 percent of donor money was given to organizations that received grant dollars from two or more foundations. One startling fact of “convergence” is that 13 of the 15 largest K-12 foundations gave grants to Teach for America. They concluded:

By targeting resources to a more focused set of organizations and allowing those organizations to grow stronger and more influential, foundations have likely increased their influence on education policy   (p. 193).

Recent articles on “A Walmart Fortune, Spreading Charter Schools” and “How Bill Gates Pulled Off the Swift Common Core Revolution” add heft to the above increased … influence on education policy.

Surely current foundations are politically engaged now at a national level far beyond earlier foundations were in advocating for a particular policy agenda. In doing so, this “convergence” of money and policy advocacy have unintentionally strengthened efforts to centralize national authority in advancing a particular agenda for school reform.  The previous voices of unions, parent groups, professional associations, university-based researchers, and civil rights organizations have become mere echoes of what influence they once had.

Frank Walsh, where are you?

 

 

Efficiency-Minded Reformers Today Draw from Efficiency-Minded Reformers of a Century Ago

The crusade among reformers for data-driven decision-making in schools and evangelizing new technologies didn’t just begin in the past decade. Its roots go back to Frederick Winslow Taylor‘s application of scientific methods a century ago to what workers do each day to increase their efficiency and productivity. In the decade before World War I and through the 1930s, borrowing from the business sector particularly manufacturing where Taylorism reigned, institutions as varied as farming, medical practice, municipal government, justice, and schools adopted Taylor’s techniques of time-and-motion studies to increase employee efficiency and find the “one best way.”

Consider Louis Brandeis, a lawyer who fought for unions, the 10-hour work day for women, and similar causes in the first decade of the 20th century. He believed in the superiority of science in gathering facts to make an argument rather than one’s opinions. Brandeis coined the phrase “scientific management, according to his biographer, and in 1914 wrote the foreword for a book written by one of Taylor’s followers called Primer of Scientific Management. Like Taylor, he saw the merits of applying scientific processes to labor and management. As a lawyer who presented briefs before state and federal courts, his biographer wrote, Brandeis brought together “the need for facts … the need to mitigate some of the harsher aspects of industrialization and the use of law as a social instrument of social policy” (p. 217). Eventually, President Woodrow Wilson appointed Brandeis to the U.S. Supreme Court justice; he served between 1916 and1939.

Like lawyer Brandeis and business and civic leaders who enlisted in the movement to use “scientific management” in every day tasks, educators including many academics, administrators and researchers of the day glommed on to it. “Educational engineers” created lists of behaviors that principals would use to evaluate teachers, checklists of what made a school building good, and measured anything that moved or was nailed down.

Academics, school boards, and superintendents–then called “administrative progressives” kissing cousins of “pedagogical progressives” who wanted to uproot traditional teaching and learning and plant student-centered learning in schools–adopted scientific ways of determining educational efficiency.

These “administrative progressives” saw “scientific management” with its meticulous registering of statistics applied to every single task as the Holy Grail, a system that would bring standards, productivity, regularity, and order to public schools.

In Raymond Callahan’s Education and The Cult Of Efficiency (1962), he documents Newton (MA) superintendent Frank Spaulding telling fellow superintendents at the annual conference of the National Education Association in 1913 how he “scientifically managed” his district (Review of Callahan book). The crucial task, Spaulding told his peers, was for district officials to measure school “products or results” and thereby compare “the efficiency of schools in these respects.” What did he mean by products?

I refer to such results as the percentage of children of each year of age [enrolled] in school; the average number of days attendance secured annually from each child; the average length of time required for each child to do a given definite unit of work…(p. 69).

Spaulding and other superintendents measured in dollars and cents whether the teaching of Latin was more efficient than the teaching of English, Algebra, or history. These “administrative progressives” recorded how much it cost to teach vocational subjects vs. academic subjects.

What Spaulding described in Newton for increased efficiency (and effectiveness) spread swiftly among school boards, superintendents, and administrators.  Academic experts hired by districts produced huge amounts of data in the 1920s and 1930s describing and analyzing every nook and cranny of buildings, how much time principals spent with students and parents, and what teachers did in daily lessons.

That efficiency-driven progressive crusade for meaningful data to inform policy decisions about district and school effectiveness continued in subsequent decades. The current donor and business-led resurgence of a “cult of efficiency,” or the application of scientific management to schooling appears in the current romance with Big Data and the onslaught of models that use algorithms to grade how well schools and individual teachers are doing, and customizing online lessons for students.

Determining which teachers are productive, i.e., “good” and which ones are inefficient, i.e., “bad” by reporting students’ test scores teacher-by-teacher as has  occurred in many big city districts such as New York City and Los Angeles Unified School District are not shockers to anyone familiar with the history of the business model in schooling. That model of competition, incentives, productivity, and efficiency has seeped into the bloodstream of schooling over the past century. Those crude efficiency studies of yesteryear are no more. But the ideas of Taylorism are present today in “standardization, the split of planning from doing, … the setting of precisely defined tasks, the emphasis on efficiency, and productivity to the exclusion of all else” (p. 501, Kanigel)

So the new “administrative progressives,” drawn from efficiency-minded wealthy donors, top state and federal policymakers, business and civic leaders, have pushed for Core State Standards, abolishing teacher tenure laws, evaluating teachers on the basis of student test scores, charters, and online instruction as policies to make U.S. schools efficient and productive.

I say that Taylorism is alive and far too well in 2014.

MOOCs Three Years Later

One constant in K-12 and higher education reform has been policymakers adopting policies they say will make fundamental changes in their institutions and seeing those efforts scaled back to become incremental changes or disappear completely (see here, here, and here).

Higher education reformers, for example, touted Open Admissions  at  City University of New York in 1970 as a fundamental change in higher education (any graduate of a New York City high school could enter CUNY, tuition-free; the number of students entering CUNY especially black and Hispanic jumped dramatically). Yet within a few years, a fiscal crisis led to altering the program. Another fiscal crisis two decades later led to CUNY charging tuition and dropping Open Admissions.

Or consider the introduction of small high schools (or schools-within-a-school of 400 or so students) in urban districts in the early 1990s. Top policy makers and enthusiastic donors believed that small high schools would restructure large (1500-plus students) comprehensive high schools leading to improved curriculum, instruction, and student academic performance. It did not happen. What did happen is that many urban districts created portfolios of schools that included large comprehensive high schools and smaller charters and magnet schools. Small high schools became an incremental change.

Again and again, the dream and rhetoric of fundamental reform gets down-sized into smaller bite-sized policy chunks.

And that is the unfolding story of MOOCs.

Where are MOOCs Now?

On the Hype Cycle, three years after they went viral I would put MOOCs into the Trough of Disappointment but slowly inching up the Slope.

 

 

 

 

 

Rather than recount the history of MOOCs (see here, here, and here) since their inception in the U.S. (but earlier in Canada), I want to concentrate on one claim that has been made repeatedly: MOOCs will revolutionize teaching and learning in U.S. higher education (see here and here). They have not even come close to either.

And they won’t for three reasons:

1.The pattern of down-sizing reforms intended to revolutionize an institution into becoming an incremental change is already underway with MOOCs.

MOOCs are peripheral at most selective residential colleges and universities. Few award credits to students taking these courses. Often at such places like Stanford, Harvard, and other elite institutions institutions, they have been folded into prior distance learning platforms.

Community colleges and lower-tier universities where teaching is primary mission, however, will increasingly adopt MOOCs as money-saving enhancements of their offerings. Nonetheless, MOOCs will remain marginal to their overall operations

2. The fundamental error in policymaker thinking is that teaching is solely delivering subject-matter to students. There is far more to teaching that content  delivery such as creating a learning culture in the classroom, organizing lessons involving students in tasks that build understanding of what is supposed to be learned, and applying and practicing newly-learned knowledge and  skills.

3. The absence of evidence for students actually learning and applying the content of MOOCs is startling.

I have tried to keep abreast of the literature on MOOCs and repeatedly I have struck out in finding studies–anecdotes there are, to be sure–that demonstrate MOOC students have learned the content of the course and applied it.

Given these reasons, for universities and colleges, then, to adopt MOOCs wholesale,  at a time when top policymakers–including President Obama–press for rating systems and more accountability for students’ performance (and debt load), would be somewhere between wacky and idiotic.

And that is why MOOCs will fall far short of transforming higher education and eventually settle into an incremental change of marginal proportions in higher education.

 

 

 

Teachers Putting Reforms into Practice: “The Implementation Problem”

Guess who wrote these paragraphs.

I’ve been struck of late by how would-be reformers have been reacting when things go awry. After all, even some of those bullish on Race to the Top have privately conceded that maybe it didn’t turn out quite like they’d hoped. Champions of teacher evaluation are busy explaining, “Well, that’s not what we meant!” when hit with complaints, lawsuits, and concerns about the reliability and validity of some ill-conceived systems. Common Core advocates are busy explaining that the goofy homework questions and worksheets don’t accurately reflect their handiwork.

In each case, we’re assured, the underlying ideas are sound–it’s just a matter of confusion or inevitable “implementation problems.” Now, it’s true that change is always hard…. But the fact that implementation problems are inevitable doesn’t mean they’re okay. More importantly, the severity of these problems is not a given: it varies depending on how complex and technocratic the measure is, whether it’s being pushed from Washington, on the breadth and depth of political support, on whether the plan is fully baked, and on the incentives for effective execution. I’ve seen precious little evidence that advocates have done much to minimize the problems.

Those championing teacher evaluation, School Improvement Grants, or Common Core frequently sound as if they think no one could have anticipated or planned for the challenges that have emerged. To my ear, the disgruntlement tends to sound like that of a kid who leaves his new bike out unlocked, and then gets furious when it’s stolen. Of course, it’s unfair. But, you know what? He really should’ve known better. Advocates tend to blame their frustrations on other folks (bike thieves, Tea Party members, textbook publishers, principals, data analysts, et al.) getting in the way or screwing up. They rarely, if ever, acknowledge that their vision of how this would go down was perhaps colored by rose-tinted glasses or that their miscalculations may have aggravated the problems.

Sounds like these paragraphs about myopic reformers failing to anticipate implementation problems might have come from reform critic Diane Ravitch  or teacher union chief, Randy Weingarten. No, neither wrote those words.

Prolific writer and blogger Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute wrote the above paragraphs. Note the above ellipsis. I left out one sentence where Hess said: And I’m sympathetic to most of the reforms we’re talking about.

Nor did I include a subsequent paragraph:

Now, I don’t want to make it sound like I’m picking on today’s reformers. The same criticisms [about implementation] have been appropriately leveled at plenty of earlier efforts, including site-based management, block scheduling, equity lawsuits, busing, de-tracking, and much else. When pursued at scale, these efforts received well-deserved critiques for both frequently disappointing and for sometimes leaving lasting problems in their wake. 

Yeah, I was trying to fool the reader. Hess has been both mostly an advocate and occasional critic of these reform policies. And here in discussing the short-sightedness of reformers he hit the nail on the head except for one crucial point.

Hess says repeatedly that policymakers should have anticipated “implementation” problems with better crafted policies and careful forethought about what to expect in putting these ideas into practice. I agree. Yet I was startled by the absence of the word “teacher” in the entire piece. Teachers had to be involved in School Improvement Grants, teacher evaluation, and Common Core but in the post they are invisible. The closest that Hess comes to mentioning teachers is in the following paragraph:

What matters in education is what actually happens in 100,000 schools educating 50 million kids. That’s all implementation, and that means it matters a lot that some reforms are much more likely to suffer bumps, distortions, and problems than are others. The more complex they are, the further away they are from schools and families, the more dependent on intensive retraining–the more likely big ideas will suffer from “implementation problems.” Yet, I rarely find would-be reformers very interested in any of this, or what it portends. I find them much more intent on driving change from wherever they happen to be, using whatever levers they happen to control.

The first sentence tiptoes up to mentioning teachers but stops. To the rest of the paragraph, I say, amen.

He is certainly correct that policy implementation is the single most important aspect of the three reforms mentioned above (and all policies directed at changing what and how something is supposed to be taught). And he is correct that policymakers pay the least attention to it. Where he swings and strikes out is failing to say explicitly that knowledgeable and skilled teachers are critically important to putting any policy into practice.

Hess advises current reformers: Pay attention to implementation. Don’t whine. Do better next time. I would re-write that first piece of advice to say: pay attention to teachers and keep the rest.

Notes to a New Teacher (Dana Dunnan)

I met Dana Dunnan 40 years ago when he was a teaching intern at Stanford University and I visited his classes at a nearby high school. He received his Master’s degree there. We reconnected when his recent book was published. Dunnan began as a high school chemistry teacher and then later taught physics, physical science, English and journalism. He also worked at the Harvard Graduate School of Education as a teaching practitioner, helped Massachusetts develop curriculum frameworks and accompanying assessment, and designed curriculum materials used in chemistry classrooms internationally.

This is an excerpt from Notes to a New Teacher. Details on the book can be found at www.chalkdustmemories.com

On top of the thrill, and abject terror, of newness, is the way schools treat beginning teachers. Since those creating schedules have developed relationships with those who they are scheduling, the classes assigned a new teacher tend to be what no one else wants to, or is willing to, teach.

My first year, when I was exclusively a chemistry teacher, I taught five classes in a seven period day. I was the only newcomer in the department, and everyone else taught four classes. Everyone else had their own classroom, and I taught in three different rooms, in three different wings of the building. Each room “belonged” to someone else, with all the territoriality that implies. Each room had a teaching aide, whom the teacher in that room treated as theirs exclusively.

By that June, I was exhausted. Having failed to leave time for exercise, my back was killing me.[1] It is not hard to see why so many people leave the profession in the first three years.

After seven years in science, I got laid off from that department. I had the option of bumping my way into the English department. I was so pissed off at being bumped out of science that I took a year’s leave of absence.

Having no kids, and a wife who was a public school speech pathologist, I could afford the time off. It rejuvenated me, allowed me to spend months with my father as he recovered from an amputation, and gave me the energy to wade into the English department.

While I did get my own room, I also got the journalism course, a grammar/vocabulary course, and a course for seniors who needed an English course for graduation requirements.

On top of knowing nothing about journalism, it was also the course that produced a weekly school paper, which was distributed in the local newspaper, for all to see and critique. There was no extra stipend for this responsibility, and it was more work than any other course in the department.

But here’s why teaching can be great- I loved teaching journalism. It was constantly stimulating, I had complete latitude in the curriculum, and the successes of my students were publicly visible, so that my competence as an instructor was not subject to adolescent whims or subjective administrative analysis.

I taught journalism for three years, and stopped because I was officially back in the science department, and the journalism had drained me.

Which brings me back to a key bit of advice to a new teacher. There is always something more you can be doing. If you have any imagination, and a desire to be better, there is always something that can improve your classroom, or your lessons, or your content knowledge. (This is well known to those evaluators who feel they must justify their existence by finding “suggestions” for your improvement.)

Resist the temptation to run to a horizon you can never reach, and save room for yourself. If you run yourself down, your teaching is going to decline anyway, and, if you get sick, and you will (as Petri dishes, schools need defer only to commercial aircraft), then you’re running uphill to make up for the time you have lost.

A very bright and driven teacher I knew created a great debate program, then found community funding to build a radio station within the school. He told me that the superintendent had words of advice for him when he had lamented how hard he was working. The superintendent said to him, “One hand for the ship, one hand for yourself.”

While it sounds like a recommendation for self-gratification, it is important advice for the beginning teacher.

The hard charger who got that advice was out of teaching within a decade, working in a bank, then a funeral home, then car sales.

One hand for the ship, one for yourself.

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[1] When I went to a doctor for an analysis of my back, he said I would need back surgery, and that I could probably never play basketball again. I spent the summer doing hundreds of sit-ups daily, and the back problem dissipated. I did, in the process, so strengthen my back muscles that, under great stress, my back would tighten up and torture me.

Stellar History Teaching in Failing Schools (Part 2)

Taking pills and sprays to remedy illness is ubiquitous in the U.S.  Ah, if there were only such quick cure-alls for lousy teaching. Say, like aerosol cans that can spray “good” teaching into a classroom.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Or maybe principals can ship cans of breakfast food to certain teachers’ homes.

 

 

 

 

Contrary to this magical thinking, first-rate teaching takes a lot of smarts, time, energy, and determination, not sprays or cans. In this post, I will describe one example of what I consider “good” teaching based on my recent observation of the teacher and his class in a history lesson in a minority-dominated high school on the East coast.**

Burt Taylor* is completing his fifth year as a world history teacher at Charlotte Forten High School (CFHS). After graduating college, he served in the U.S. Army for over three years. While serving in Afghanistan, his mother sent him Frank McCourt’s Teacher Man and urged him to consider teaching after he left the service. He did. In 2007, He joined Teach for America. After his five weeks of training in Philadelphia (which he found of little use in his first year as a teacher), he was sent to a large Eastern urban school district. He began teaching world history there in 2009.

While he did not major in history as an undergraduate, he does have (and did enjoy) a “passion for reading and studying history since I was a kid.” The African American and Latino high school students he faces for 80- and 90-minute courses four times a day, while coming to school with “many challenges,” has made teaching at CFHS “rewarding.”

Finishing his fifth year, Taylor remembers well the turmoil in the school since he began teaching. The turmoil, however, came not from students but from the district office. Because of persistent low test-scores on standardized tests, poor attendance, high numbers of dropouts, and a graduation rate of just over 50 percent, district administrators “restructured” CFHS twice, meaning that the first “restructuring” didn’t work and meaning that Taylor had to reapply to teach history each time and a new principal had to decide whether to hire him.

I observed Taylor’s world history class for 70 minutes and interviewed him afterwards. In the class of 25 who are enrolled, 15 were present sitting at pods of three desks clustered around the spacious room. Student were 10th and 11th graders, many of whom had failed the course in the previous year. The lesson I observed, student attendance for that class, materials Taylor used, and participation were, in his word, “typical” of other classes he has taught.

The materials Taylor used was drawn from a pool of lessons available online from the project “Reading Like a Historian.” He has used other lessons offered by the Stanford History Education Group. I asked: how did he come to this website? From district or school professional development? From a fellow teacher? No, he said. He had stumbled over the website, liked it for the focus on concepts and the work of historians, and ended up adapting lessons to his classroom.

The lesson I observed was the “Invasion of Nanking.” Basically, Taylor used the source material–photos, one excerpt from a Japanese textbook and one from a Chinese text on the invasion and then a final selection from an eminent historian of Chinese history on what happened in the city in 1937–to get across the idea that textbooks are biased, have points of view and, like a detective, it is critical to figure out the perspective buried in the text.

On the whiteboard in front of room, Taylor had listed each activity the class would do with times allotted for each one. An alarm on his desk would ding to end activity. Here’s how Taylor unfolded the lesson on the invasion of Nanking.

+ For the “warm-up” activity as students entered the class and settled into their seats,  Taylor had a photo with no caption on his “smart board” with questions for the students to answer about the photo (“List what you see in photo. What questions do you have? What conclusions do you have?”).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

+He walked around the room to see what students were writing and marked each student’s “Daily Participation Grade” sheet which they had picked up on entering room. The sheet has a section set aside for “Warm Up” and two boxes for teacher to mark: “Partial” and “Good To Go.”

+Teacher then compiled on “smart board” what students have written down about the photo. He called on students by name and a few raised their hands (no questions to entire group with choral responses from students). From clues in the photo, students realized that it showed a post-battle scene in an Asian city many years ago.

+Taylor then told students that the scene in the photo occurred in Nanking in 1937 after the Japanese invaded China. “We are,” he said to class, “going to figure out what happened in Nanking in that year.” In a mini-lecture–he asked students to take notes–he gave them the background of the invasion and what happened in the 1930s in Japan. Of the 15 in class, 13 were writing as Taylor lectured for about ten minutes. He then told the class that they will read two different paragraphs from textbooks about the same event–the invasion of Nanking–and challenged them to detect which description came from a Japanese text and which from a Chinese text.

+To insure that students knew the geography of the photo and sources, he had them go to a shelf holding a classroom set of world history texts and turn to page 594 to see map of Japan, China, and region. He asked questions about location of countries. He then told class that he will ask a “trick question” about the photo and the excerpts from the texts. So they “should pay attention” to what he says and what they read.

+Each three-person pod was a small group made up of a “reader,” “materials manager,” and “discussion leader.” He called on “material managers” to come up to desk and get textbook excerpts. They did. Taylor then instructed “readers” to read aloud to their group each excerpt, labeled A and B. For words students did not know, they were to underline them and try to figure out what they mean. The “reader” in the group near me stumbled on the word “atrocity” and was discussing it when Taylor, carrying a clipboard to assess each student’s participation, came by.

+Afterwards, he asked each group to decide whether A and B were from either a Japanese or Chinese text. “Discussion leaders” in each group worked to get agreement about texts–one group was excited enough to give each other fist bumps on completing their choices.

+Taylor then recorded the student votes for text A coming from a Japanese text (8) and (7) voted for B excerpted from Chinese text. He then asked individual students to give their reasons why they voted as they did using the text for evidence supporting their answer. After the back-and-forth of this discussion, Taylor offered the students another chance to vote and many crossed over from their original vote, agreeing that A came from a Japanese textbook.

+The teacher then asked: “Which of these two textbook accounts do you trust?” Students raised hands and Taylor also called on students who had not participated in whole-group discussion. Students largely agreed that you cannot trust either one because each side wanted to portray the Nanking invasion as either common in wartime or that it was a massacre. When the teacher asked what they had learned so far, many responded with variations of: there are at least two sides to listen to when something occurs; you cannot believe that textbooks tell the “truth” of the past.

+Then, Taylor called for “materials managers” to come up to desk to get a final excerpt written by a historian of Chinese history. They did. “Readers” sprang into action, and the “discussion leaders” led exchanges in the group to determine what the historian contributed to their earlier decision on Text A and B. For the 10 minutes of this final activity, Taylor, carrying his clipboard, listened in to each group, asked and answer student queries, and jotted down notes.

+Finally, Taylor asked students what they learned from reading the historian’s account and Text A and B. Answers varied a great deal from those who raised their hands to reply. The teacher also called on a few students who did not raise their hands. Students felt that the historian’s view of the invasion of Nanking was most accurate because the historian used Chinese, Japanese, and non-Asian sources who were there at the time. Taylor nodded his head and said the historian “corroborated” his account of what happened with other sources, an essential in writing about the past.

I had to leave the room to observe another teacher as Taylor was winding down the lesson.

I felt that Taylor demonstrated much planning, extraordinary management of the material and class organization, and was constantly assessing what students were doing and their level of understanding of the questions and tasks he had assigned. For me, this lesson was stellar.

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Note to Readers: Burt Taylor told me in a subsequent phone interview that he would be leaving CFHS in June to  take a position in a federal agency. When I asked him whether he plans to return to teaching history at CFHS or any high school, he said, he probably would not.

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*I promised confidentiality to teachers in this study so individual and school names in post are pseudonyms.

**Note carefully that this instance of “good” teaching is a hybrid of teacher-centered and student-centered traditions in instruction(see here). Note further that I will not determine whether the teacher is successful (see Part 1).